04/21/2009

How To Make Yourself Look Stupid

The current Republican outrage over President Obama acting politely in meeting Hugo Chavez is so ignorant of history it takes your breath away. Gingrich has a PhD in history. One might imagine he'd have some understanding of Presidential behavior. One would be wrong.

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Kruschev, Mao, Brezhnev, Abdulla and Chavez.

One of these things is not like the others.

And a trivia question: Who said the following:

"Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year. I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort because I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are.

I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse. But I certainly agree that we need to get back to diplomacy, which has been turned into a bad word by this administration.

And I will purse very vigorous diplomacy.

And I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way. But certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.

Chavez is a pipsqueak who -- like Rush Limbaugh -- measures his success based on how irritating he can be. Turning purple with rage every time he dons clown shoes in front of a TV camera does nothing to advance American interests.

Obama was polite to Chavez at a hemispheric summit meeting. Shaking hands and smiling is not a meeting with the President any more than bumping into Angelina Jolie at the deli is a date.

This is just the Republican outrage of the week. We get that you hate Obama, that nothing he does will please you, and that your emotional gamut runs from reflexive scorn to sputtering rage. We get that you have nothing productive to contribute and not a clue how to govern effectively.

Steve,
If you believe that things the Democrats have done "worked" for them, you are indeed delusional. I am a Democrat, I know. We can barely organize a barbeque, let alone counteract a serving President with Karl Rove and Dick Cheney as hatchetmen. The last two election cycles were less about the great job Democrats did (though we Obama supporters did do a great intra-party job of stealing the nomination from the heir-apparent,Hillary), it was a case of Republicans, led by the White House shooting themselves in their collective foot.

That's just the thing Tom. (oh, and notice I was laughing when I posted that) The problem BOTH parties have is they talk a good game when running for office and then once they are in power they effectively screw the pooch. Given time, the Dems will do the same thing. I am not making any partisan statement here, as I said, both sides are guilty of the same thing. If anything over the past few years I've become a fan of gridlock (only half joking).

Steve gets it. Frank gets it. And it's starting to dawn on a lot of other people, I think, too. Both parties are corrupt and will screw us over when they get into power.

But when will this lead to them no longer voting for the bastards? We've effectively forgotten how to vote in this country; once Republicans know we'll keep voting for them out of fear of the Democrats and vice versa, the motivation for them to behave once in office is practically nil. Only when voters are willing to tell even their preferred candidates to go screw themselves when that candidate lies, runs up the deficit, etc. are we going to get any semblance of good government.

So for God's sakes: starting in 2010, don't vote for a Democrat or Republican. Instead, vote Libertarian; yeah, you may not agree with them on this or that, but they're the only party that obviously mean it when they say they want to save us from financial ruin. And just seeing their percentage of the national take go from .3% or whatever to 1% or 2% would start pissing off those pigs in office now.